Jersey Hospice lottery tickets go on sale in next two weeks

Tickets for the 2011 Jersey Hospice Care Million Pound Lottery go on sale in two weeks.

Islanders are being encouraged to gather up their syndicates for the annual lottery.

Tickets will cost £300 each and as with last year, there are 6,000 up for grabs at Lloyds TSB branches in St Helier and St Brelade from 26 April.

The first person who queues outside each of the branches will win a free breakfast for two at the Grand Jersey.

The event has become the Jersey Hospice's biggest annual fundraiser and is expected to raise £500,000.

And islanders have the chance to win a share of a cool £1.3 million in prize money, with £1 million as first prize, followed by £100,000, £75,000, £50,000, £25,000 and five prizes of £10,000.

And the odds are pretty good - with a one in 600 chance of winning a prize of least £10,000.

Individuals and syndicates will be able to buy tickets at the Lloyds TSB St Helier branch in Broad Street from Tuesday 26 April (excluding bank holidays) and for two weeks at the Lloyds TSB St Brelade branch at Les Quennevais from
Tuesday 26 April until Friday 6 May inclusive (excluding bank holidays).

Payment for tickets can only be made by cash or cheque and you must be over the age of 18.

The event is the fifth of its kind and this year Jersey Hospice Care is setting a challenge to try and sell all the tickets within four weeks.

Jersey Hospice Care Chairman Dr Gari Purcell-Jones said: "We’d really like everyone to buy their tickets as soon as possible. We have more than 80 volunteers helping us to sell tickets and we are very grateful to them and the staff at Lloyds TSB who are so supportive, but the event is quite resource heavy. It would be wonderful if we could sell out by the end of May.

"We appreciate that £300 is a considerable amount for individuals, particularly
given the current economic climate. Once again we’d encourage people to join together and form as many syndicates as they can."

Winning numbers will be drawn on Friday 2 September at the Grand Jersey hotel, broadcast live on Channel Television and published live on the charity’s social networking sites Twitter.com/JerseyHospice and Facebook.com/JerseyHospiceCare and website www.jerseyhospicecare.com.

Jersey Hospice Care provides holistic care, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to islanders with cancer and motor neurone disease within patients’ homes and at Clarkson House in the Day Hospice and the In-Patient Unit. The charity’s Community Bereavement Service is also available to all islanders who have suffered a loss, regardless of the nature of bereavement.

It is an an independent charity which makes no charge to patients and receives no funding from the States of Jersey, Marie Curie Cancer or Macmillan Cancer Support, towards its operational costs and relies entirely on the generosity of the public to cover these.

It costs just in excess of £6,000 a day and more than £2 million to run Jersey Hospice Care every year. All funds raised for the charity remain in the island.

Currently, around 200 deaths out of a total of 720 each year in Jersey are from cancer. Demand for Jersey Hospice Care continues to rise, with estimates that by 2030, cases of cancer will rise, mainly due to an ageing population, with one in four expected to be terminal. (from CTV)